The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch.

Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his weekly viewing of The Truth Project. HejustcompletedLessonFive. More so than the previous lessons, Lesson 5 focused on a critique of mainstream science, and evolution in particular. Bear in mind that Mike is about as fair-minded as they come, but he is shocked by Del Tackett’s blatant misrepresentations of clear facts and doesn’t hold anything back in his detailed analysis. Make sure you check it out, especially if you’ve seen TTP and didn’t notice anything wrong!

(Thinking about what Mike has told us about Lesson 5 has really gotten my dander up. You’ve been warned.)

In all honesty, it moves me to disgust to think of all the churches that purchase and publicize viewings of The Truth [sic] Project. I can just picture the viewers congregating, hoping to see the scientific disciplines and those who accept their consensus belittled in favor of their own half-baked, long since outdated, and yet completely unquestionable alternatives. I see them in my head, looking just like so many similar audiences of which I’ve been a part: sighing in relief at their growing confidence in their preset beliefs, grinning at one another as Tackett mocks his opposition with convenient lies and half-truths, laughing at all those simpleton atheistic outsiders as though their ears were being tickled with a feather reminiscent of his arguments’ combined intellectual weight.

This is what gets me: so many of these truly precious people live lives of humility and self-sacrifice out of genuine love for one another and for others in need, and yet here, in contradictory condescension, they accept wholesale dismissals of the virtual entirety of the scientific community and those convinced by their arguments.

Christians, self-professing lovers of truth, do you think “the church” is all about getting together to reaffirm your consensus just-so stories that you somehow suppose to be more valid because non-Christians cite actual evidence to the contrary? Despite the fact that hosts of other honest, truth-loving Christians acknowledge that evidence? Do you judge what’s true by what bolsters your inspired, inerrant, and infallible views on Scripture? Is it too much to ask that you examine all things to see if they are true?

I can understand believing in something despite a lack of evidence, something we all do in one way or another, believer and unbeliever alike. But it’s another thing entirely to invite people like Tackett into your churches and to uncritically accept all of his convenient “evidence” and characterizations of the opposition, disregarding even the mere possibility of actual contradictory evidence. Even if your predetermined conclusions are actually accurate, do you want to believe the right things for the wrong reasons? You can’t assume what these guys say is true any more than the Bereans blindly accepted what Paul said was true. This goes for much more than creationism/ID/evolutionism — it goes for anything your Christian teachers tell you. If you’re not going to fact check what they tell you, at least don’t dishonor the truth by gleefully accepting only what jibes with what you already believe and then feeling more enlightened than those who don’t.